All Posts in Office Politics

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

The older I get, the less patience I have for writing up meeting notes.

Too bad for me. While the skills known collectively as facilitation are undoubtedly the most important when the subject is running a meeting, the art of writing the notes afterward comes in closer than you might think.

As form should always follow function, start with the purpose of writing and distributing meeting notes.

If you’re feeling mentally lazy you might suggest something shallow, like, “To document the meeting.” This isn’t so much wrong, as the comedian once said, as insufficiently right.

Back up a step, because the purpose meeting notes serve comes from the purpose of the meetings being noted. While there are lots of reasons for people to meet in an organization, one way or another most meetings are part of some process whose goal is to get to an important result of some kind.

Meeting notes have to be understood within this larger context. Their purpose is to summarize what was agreed to and, if a point was contentious, why it was agreed to that way; also to establish who is supposed to do what as a result of the meeting and when it’s due.

Which is why good meeting notes aren’t meeting minutes, and why the reason Herodotus is known both as the father of history and the father of lies might have some bearing on the subject. History is storytelling, not a neutral recounting of all the small episodes that make up the events being recounted.

Meeting notes are the history of a meeting, where meeting minutes are a he-said/she-said account of who said what and in what order, not very different from the transcript from a trial. Publish meeting minutes and you’re doing a few things, all bad.

You’re (1) asking everyone in attendance to live through the meeting a second time, and wasn’t the first time bad enough? (2) asking those who weren’t in attendance to make sense of a conversation from an account that’s intrinsically incomplete — incomplete because more than half the information content of a conversation is conveyed non-verbally and therefore isn’t in the notes; and (3) shirking your responsibility to explain what happened.

Meeting minutes are like a photograph where the photographer made sure the subject was in the frame somewhere and clicked the shutter. Good meeting notes are like the same subject, shot by a photographer who carefully composed the image, paid attention to the lighting, and set the shutter speed and aperture so as to maximize sharpness while choosing a depth of field that directs the viewer’s eyes to what ought to be noticed in the picture.

Good meeting notes are a narrative — the story of what happened in the meeting, told to remind the participants and inform any other interested parties of what happened and why it happened that way.

And not just remind, but gently adjust memories so people recall a meeting that was a bit closer to the one that should have happened than the one that actually did happen.

Is this dishonest? That depends on whether the adjustment leads everyone to understand the important points that came out of the meeting better, or to think the meeting’s results were different from what they actually were.

This is part of the storyteller’s art regardless of the story being told. Any narrative that describes every possible detail is a narrative so tedious that it conveys none of them.

Minutes are merely a record. Notes explain.

And this is why distributing smartboard images and other no-effort alternatives is a bad idea: They leave the reader too much latitude to misunderstand the point of it all. They provide no context.

Accurate minutes would be worse. Imagine how they’d have to read: “George reported that progress on the new building was delayed because the vendor was unable to ship the HVAC compressor due to flooding in central China. Fred screamed at George angrily for five minutes in response, explaining why the delay is unacceptable and puts George’s career in jeopardy because “HE ISN’T TAKING RESPONSIBILITY!” George shrank down in his chair with a frightened look in his eyes.”

Don’t misunderstand. There is a place for meeting minutes (although probably a notch less accurate than my example). That place is antagonistic settings that could result in litigation. If you have to publish notes from those sorts of meetings, ask permission to record the meeting and transcribe away.

But otherwise, the nature of good meeting notes is exactly why my patience for writing them is decreasing as I get older:

They require time, attention, and worst of all, effort.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

I have just one question about Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s comments regarding women’s compensation: Did he deserve all the outrage?

Let’s start with his actual words:

Maria Klawe: What do you advise women who are interested in advancing their careers but they’re not comfortable with putting themselves up for promotions or advanced opportunities?

Satya Nadella: The thing that perhaps most  influenced me in terms of how you look at the journey or a career…There was this guy whose name is Mike Naples who was President of Microsoft when I joined, and he has this saying that all HR systems are long-term efficient, short-term inefficient.

And I thought that phrase just captured it. Which is…it’s not really about asking for the raise but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go long.

And that I think might be one of the additional “superpowers,” that quite frankly, women who don’t ask for a raise have. Because that’s good karma. It will come back. Somebody’s going to know that’s the kind of person I want to trust. That’s the kind of person that I want to give more responsibility to.

And in the long-term efficiency, things catch up. And I wonder whether taking the long-term approach helps solve for “Am I getting paid right?” Am I getting rewarded right?” The reality is the best work is not followed with your best rewards. Your best work then has impact, people recognize it, and then you get the rewards. And you somehow have to think that through.”

Opinion: The problem here isn’t that Nadella is insensitive to women’s realities. It’s that he’s insensitive to how things happen here on the planet I like to call “earth.”

The problem, that is, is that this isn’t how things actually work.

When an employee, male or female, does great work and that great work has impact, that doesn’t mean anyone in management will even know which employee deserves the credit.

Credit-stealing is routine in American business. Worse, or perhaps better, great work and impact are usually produced by a team. Balancing the importance of valuing team effort with the varying contributions of different team members is quite a difficult feat.

Also, Nadella seems to be implying that promotions and raises come from doing something that has a strong positive impact. I sure hope not. That’s what bonuses are for. Employers should give employees raises when they’re worth more in the employment marketplace, and promotions when they’re capable of a more responsible and valuable job.

What happens instead: When companies underpay employees the result is a short-term increase in profitability. And as accounting systems don’t have any way to represent the loss of talented employees on financial statements, the whole system is tilted in this direction.

The result: In the vast majority of corporations, employees don’t get what they deserve, they get what they negotiate, just like the ad in the in-flight magazines tells you.

Nardella’s response was, in many respects, thoughtful. The problem was that he failed to include something critical, namely, useful advice for the world as it actually is. A far better response would have been:

The situation for women at Microsoft … and at any other company, but I only have influence over Microsoft … should be exactly like the situation for male employees. What we’re striving for is that no employee should ever have to ask for a raise or promotion. We want every employee to be in a position they can succeed in, and that provides them with opportunities to achieve and grow. And we want to pay every employee what he or she is truly worth.

If we’re failing to do that for any employee, that employee should make her … or his … case and we should listen and make an objective judgment. We should give that employee a raise or promotion if one is warranted, and an honest response either way.

As a general rule, in U.S. businesses at least, men are better at negotiating these things than women. Worse, it’s considered okay for men to negotiate such things, much more so than for women who do the exact same thing.

And as the big three when it comes to compensation de-motivators are arrogance, disrespect and unfairness, it’s unsurprising that women, more than men, are likely to find their compensation de-motivating.

Were Mr. Nardella’s words disrespectful to women? I don’t think so. They were worse than that.

They were terrible advice.

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